Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I
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| Artist | Gustav Klimt |
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| Year | 1907 |
| Type | Oil, silver, and gold on canvas |
| Dimensions | 138 cm × 138 cm (54 in × 54 in) |
| Location | Neue Galerie, New York |
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (also called The Lady in Gold or The Woman in Gold) is a 1907 painting by Gustav Klimt. The first of two portraits Klimt painted of Bloch-Bauer, it has been referred to as the final and most fully representative work of his golden phase. It is on display at the Neue Galerie in New York City as part of the largest Klimt collection in the U.S.
Adele Bloch-Bauer (1881–1925) was a wealthy member of Viennese society and a patron and close friend of Gustav Klimt. Klimt originally titled the painting as Adele Bloch-Bauer, but Nazi soldiers seized the painting from the Bloch-Bauer home and displayed it in the early 1940s, removing the name and instead calling it The Woman in Gold so that it could be displayed without referencing a prominent Jewish family.
Klimt took three years to complete the painting; preliminary drawings for it date from 1903/4. It measures 54" x 54" [138 x 138 cm] and is made of oil and gold on canvas, showing elaborate and complex ornamentation as seen in the Jugendstil style. Klimt was a member of the Vienna Secession, a group of artists that broke away from the traditional way of painting. The picture was painted in Vienna and commissioned by Adele's husband Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. As a wealthy industrialist who had made his fortune in the sugar industry, he sponsored the arts and favored and supported Gustav Klimt. Adele Bloch-Bauer became the only model who was painted twice by Klimt when he completed a second picture of her, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II, in 1912.
In her will, it is claimed that Adele Bloch-Bauer asked her husband to consider donating his Klimt paintings to the Austrian State Gallery upon his death. She died in 1925 from meningitis. When Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938 in the action known as the Anschluss, her widower fled to Prague and subsequently to Zürich. Most of his properties in Austria, including his Klimt paintings, were looted and the attorney Friedrich Führer was designated to administer their sale or disposal on behalf of the German state. In 1941, it was acquired by the Austrian state gallery, housed in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna.
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